Keith Srakocic/AP Photo
A picketer at one of the gates outside the closed General Motors automobile assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, September 16, 2019.
America’s two major legacy automakers—General Motors and Ford—think they’ve figured out a way to comply with President Biden’s push to go all-electric, while at the same time flouting his push to create well-paying union jobs.
GM is currently building two new battery cell factories near the sites of two of its more storied, now shuttered factories—one in Lordstown, Ohio (where, 50 years ago, workers struck to protest the speedup of the assembly line), the other in Spring Hill, Tennessee (where GM used to produce Saturns). While early battery cell technology was first devised by American scientists, Wall Street’s insistence on cheaper, offshore production quickly located the factories abroad, chiefly in South Korea, until eventually the R&D relocated there, too. Not surprisingly, then, these new GM factories are joint ventures with the South Korean battery company LG Chem.
Because GM has had nationwide contracts with the United Auto Workers since the early 1940s, all of its U.S.-based plants have been unionized. Now, however, GM is saying that because its new factories will be joint ventures, it will not commit to their being union. Nor will it commit to having workers simply choose to join or reject a union by signing affiliation cards. Instead, it insists that workers will have to go through an election, meaning that management—which GM could pretend is really the management of LG Chem, not good old GM, the workers’ friend—could oppose the workers’ unionization efforts. As Amazon just demonstrated at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, deep-pocketed and coercive management opposition is almost always sufficient to intimidate workers from choosing to go union.
Not surprisingly, the UAW is up in arms about this decision, demanding that GM not use its move into electric cars as an excuse to weaken its workers’ bargaining power. The UAW favors management neutrality, in which workers are free to sign or not to sign union affiliation cards.
And today, the race to the bottom of autoworker power accelerated with Ford’s announcement that it, too, would begin electric battery production with a joint venture of its own with non-union SK Innovation.
American big business is being highly selective in comporting its plans to President Biden’s vision for American industrial renewal. Green sí, good jobs no! appears to be the watchword at Ford and GM. Perhaps Biden should speak louder or carry a bigger stick. He has a bully pulpit and the power to let federal contracts; he should begin to use them.
